Surge: Note-off trigger

[mkruselj]

Currently Surge works like most synths on the market - you trigger it by note on events.

It would be quite cool if we could set the scene so that it triggers on note OFF instead. Since we have two scenes, this could be used to create all sorts of interesting sounds that have a very distinct release portion, or to just have a bog-standard note-off retrigger (which is useful for emulating certain acoustic sounds, like guitar tremolo picking or cimbalom, say...)

[baconpaul]

Interesting; and related to #811 also.

For synths that do support a note off trigger, what do they use as their note off? So what is the note off off?

[mkruselj]

There is none, it would be an endless event in that case, until amp envelope kills it. So, you'd need to be careful not to use the Sustain parameter of the envelope.

[baconpaul]

Gotcha so a note on where the amp eg end of delay issues a release

[baconpaul]

As mentioned on slack: the above comment makes sense in my mind but not when translated through my keyboard. I’ll update the issue more cleanly later

[mkruselj]

Yeah...

Note-off triggered scene should care only about DAHD stages of the envelope, and disregard SR. Possibly also a good idea to make those sliders semi-transparent in case this option is enabled.

[mortfell]

seems like cool idea/implementation

[VincyZed]

Yup, I agree, great idea!

[baconpaul]

As I mentioned on slack I think the most surge-y way to do this is to allow lfo modulators to trigger based on note off also. Then you could have radically different sounds and modulations in the release phase of a voice.

Couple that with having velocity reset to not off velocity; and modify the amp envelope so that release can be a constant rather than ramp down and you could do quite a lot without adding an big new concept of “second voice class”

[mortfell]

I agree about the LFO triggered by note offs being more Surge-y
You could still devote an entire Scene to a note-off sound if you wanted to work that way, but it would be nice to be able to design sounds with note off events while remaining in one Scene.

[mortfell]

This issue is maybe not related directly to FM, but It would definitely be really useful for a lot of FM patches!

[baconpaul]

Just re-reading this and knowing how surge voice works, it’s actually not that hard. I think there’s two actual things suggested here

1: have an LFO have a fourth mode; as well as keytrigger have releasetrigger
2: have a scene have a “note off” mode where basically all the envelopes never sustain (so the ADSR gets released as if you release the key immediately; or perhaps when the decay is done)

These are both super interesting so let me tentatively put this in a 1.6.6 set, whatever 1.6.6 might be...